The Guardian recently featured a puff piece on Arizona abortion business Camelback Family Planning, in a state where pro-abortion amendment Proposition 139 passed last week, allowing abortion through all 40 weeks of pregnancy. If the amendment had failed, abortion would have remained legal in Arizona up until 15 weeks, with an exception for medical emergencies beyond that age.
Since intentionally and directly killing a preborn child is not necessary in order to end a pregnancy when a medical emergency occurs (though early delivery may be necessary), the entire article seems to be a calculated step to promote killing innocent children as health care. Camelback’s abortionist, Gabrielle Goodrick, was scheduled to see 40 patients that day, but the one The Guardian chose to feature was happily pregnant with her second child until her water broke at 17 weeks. The Guardian reported, “With no amniotic fluid left in her uterus, it’s only a matter of time until an infection sets in.” But if an infection was certain, this woman should have been sent to a hospital instead of an abortion business.
Frankly, there are many things about this story that do not seem to add up.
At a Glance:
- The woman was allegedly experiencing PPROM, so she should have been obtaining care at a hospital, not an abortion business, due to potential risk of infection.
- The woman allegedly claimed the hospital would not help her, but it is unclear from the article what this means. The standard of care for PPROM is typically expectant management, not necessarily immediate delivery or induced abortion; expectant management requires other treatment to stop labor, and close monitoring of the patient to prevent infection. (If an infection occurs, the situation becomes emergent; the treatment would be antibiotics in the hospital, and immediate delivery.)
- When she said the hospital would not help her, it is unclear if that means they actually refused to offer her care, or if the standard of care they offered was not the “care” she wanted (abortion).
- The woman attempted to schedule an abortion out of state in Las Vegas (another hint that her situation must not have been emergent, despite PPROM), but that abortion business only did D&Es, which dismember babies, and she wanted to hold her child to “say goodbye.”
- The woman instead took the abortion pill at 17 weeks, administered at Camelback Family Planning in Arizona — establishing further that her medical situation and condition were likely not emergent.
Yet none of these obvious inconsistencies stopped The Guardian from portraying the intentional killing of the woman’s preborn child as ‘medically necessary.’
Abortion is not the standard of care for PPROM
The woman at Camelback was experiencing preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM). According to the Cleveland Clinic, if a woman’s water breaks before 37 weeks, a doctor should weigh the risks of premature birth against the risks of complications such as infection. PPROM usually occurs after labor has already started even if women can’t feel the contractions, said the Cleveland Clinic. The treatment a woman and her baby need will depend on how far along in the pregnancy they are, but there are two typical options.
Doctors will offer to complete the delivery of the baby or offer expectant management, which involves a treatment to delay labor. That could include bed rest, medications to stop labor, and frequent monitoring for infection.
If, like the woman at Camelback, the baby is younger than 34 weeks, the doctor should provide antibiotics to prevent infection and prolong the pregnancy, tocolytics to stop labor, magnesium sulfate to help the baby’s brain, and corticosteroids to help the baby’s lungs. The goal is to prevent labor for as long as possible until the baby is old enough to survive outside the womb.
It appears that either this woman’s primary doctors did not provide these options to her, or she refused them.
The notion that this woman needed an abortion to prevent infection is a false narrative aimed at normalizing abortion and marketing it as actual health care. She was not destined to develop an infection if doctors took proper steps, but if an infection did begin, she could have been treated with preterm delivery. Though her baby would not have survived such a premature birth at 17 weeks or even 19 weeks, this would not have been an induced abortion because the goal was not to kill the baby.
Still, Goodrick claims, “No one will do it,” as in, no doctors would treat the woman. Either she’s not being truthful, or the doctors in Arizona who originally treated the woman have seriously failed her and her baby and are therefore guilty of medical negligence.
“When she found out that we could see her, she started crying,” Goodrick said. “She was so upset still about the hospital not helping her. She was just overwhelmingly relieved.”
It remains unclear why the hospital would not assist her — but again, it is unknown if the woman refused the standard of care and instead demanded an unnecessary induced abortion.
But Goodrick doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being a paragon of good medical practice, either. As Live Action News previously reported:
[Goodrick] has previously demanded that doctors all support abortion, arguing that intentionally taking a human life is the same thing as removing a gall bladder. Even more disturbingly, she has a history of rule-breaking, and complained about being required to have the necessary emergency equipment in her facility, in case one of the women she’s treating has a medical emergency.
Furthermore, Goodrick had her medical license restricted because it was discovered that she was abusing prescription drugs, like fentanyl, while committing abortions. Her facility was also found in a Live Action investigation to be breaking the law by committing sex-selective abortions — something that is a felony in Arizona.
Goodrick also exhibited carelessness with controlled substances, regularly leaving bottles of medications like Percocet and Oxycodone openly lying around the facility, rather than locking them up securely as required.
A dismemberment abortion
Abortion advocates avoid using the term “dismemberment” when discussing a D&E (dilation and evacuation) abortion, but The Guardian exposes that the baby truly is dismembered during the procedure.
It explains that the woman first considered traveling to Las Vegas to have the abortion, signaling that she was not facing an immediate risk to her health and that perhaps she had freely chosen abortion over the standard of care for PPROM.
But the abortion facility in Las Vegas, reported The Guardian, “only offers a procedure called dilation and evacuation. During a D&E, a patient’s cervix is dilated, often using small rods called laminaria that slowly expand over the course of one to two days, before a doctor empties the the patient’s uterus using suction or surgical instruments. It’s difficult for providers to remove the fetus intact during a D&E — but this woman wants to hold her baby to say goodbye.”
The rhetoric is thick. Rather than saying that the abortionist will remove the now-deceased baby from the womb in pieces — dismemberment — The Guardian uses the terms “empties the patient’s uterus using suction or surgical instruments” and adds that it’s “difficult.. to remove the fetus intact…”
What The Guardian doesn’t say is that during a D&E, the abortionist uses a Sopher clamp to grasp the baby’s arms and legs and tear them off the body, then removing the rest of the baby in pieces. He will then crush the baby’s skull, and, as described in the video below by former abortionist Dr. Kathi Aultman, he will know he has succeeded in crushing the skull when the baby’s brain matter leaks out of her mother’s vagina:
A push for wider use of the abortion pill
It’s no wonder this patient didn’t want to take part in such a horrific procedure. She opted instead for Camelback’s use of the abortion pill late in pregnancy even though it has not been FDA-approved for use beyond 10 weeks. This is part of a wider push to expand “self-managed” abortions through the abortion pill. Sixty-three percent of abortions are now carried out by the abortion pill — and apparently, abortionists want that number to increase and are pushing for its use later and later into pregnancy, like Goodrick.
The abortion pill includes the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol — and in an unknown number of cases, the baby apparently doesn’t die before delivery. Research notes, “In medical abortions, neither mifepristone nor misoprostol kills the fetus. The trauma of labor usually results in the death of the fetus up through 21 weeks of pregnancy. However, some fetuses at 22 weeks’ gestation or after may survive labor associated with medical abortion.”
Goodrick and her colleagues published a study of their own in which they gave the abortion pill to women who were 18 to 24 weeks pregnant. Shockingly, they seem unfazed by these facts: 1) 36.5% of the women (over a third) needed a follow-up surgical abortion because the abortion pill failed, and 2) two women suffered adverse events, with one being a uterine rupture. Failure of the abortion pill appears to have been a factor in the death Amber Thurman in Georgia.
Goodrick wasn’t the only one carrying out experiments on women seeking abortion. Keisha Atkins visited the Southwestern Women’s Options abortion facility in New Mexico in 2017, where the abortionists experimented on her (and hundreds of other women) to see if the use of mifepristone would accelerate a late-term induction abortion. Their research noted complications such as hemorrhage, cervical laceration, retained placenta, and extramural delivery (delivery outside a hospital/operating room). Atkins became septic (a known side effect of the abortion pill) and died.
Goodrick trains medical students in this method of second-trimester abortion and used the method on this particular patient, saying that she had found a “loophole” in the 15-week Arizona law. The woman took mifepristone, and the next day, Goodrick gave her misoprostol, again confirming that her health was not under immediate threat.
Now, Goodrick claims to be treating a stillbirth — not carrying out an induced abortion. (Late-term abortionist Warren Hern also appears to be trying a similar ‘sleight of hand’ by lethally injecting a preborn child and then sending a woman back to her home state and personal physician. Hern says, “I don’t call that an abortion.”)
No matter how The Guardian frames it or the amount of rhetoric it uses, it cannot hide the fact that the woman was not in medical distress, that induced abortion is not the standard of care for PPROM, that a D&E doesn’t involve ’emptying the uterus’ but dismembering a living human being, and that intentional killing is not necessary and is not health care.
Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.
